John Bolton: Republican Candidates ‘Who Backed Away from Trump’ Lost

On Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily, former U.N. Ambassador and AEI senior fellow John Bolton, who is also the head of a political action committee, told SiriusXM host Alex Marlow that “the opportunities are enormous going forward” from Donald Trump’s presidential victory.

“Just to start with, the Senate and the House,” he continued. “We apparently are going to lose two seats, in Illinois and New Hampshire. Kelly Ayotte conceded yesterday. We will win the Louisiana seat in December, I’m almost certain of that. So to emerge in what could have been a terrible year with only two losses is incredible.”

“Where we did have losses – Joe Heck in Nevada and Kelly Ayotte, as I mentioned in New Hampshire – they were two candidates who backed away from Trump,” he continued. “I supported both of them, there’s no doubt about it, because they were strong on national security, but they made a political error. It hasn’t been true for every candidate. Some in the House who distanced themselves from Trump, like Barbara Comstock, went on to win.”

“The state where we did worst was Nevada, where we lost two Republican seats – I think because of the Heck loss, and the loss of the race at the presidential level to Harry Reid’s machine,” Bolton mused. “Think about that. Nevada is a Republican state. You’ve got great young Republican prospects there, like Attorney General Adam Laxalt, Paul Laxalt’s grandson. So even in a state where we did poorly this year, the prospects for Republicans are great.”

“So you’ve got a Republican president, Republican Senate, Republican House. There is no excuse, no excuse now, to not make the changes in Washington we want. And, by the way, because of the aforementioned, we will now have every prospect of a conservative Supreme Court and a conservative judiciary for the next generation. If we blow this opportunity, we don’t deserve to win,” he warned.

Bolton agreed with Marlow that Trump voters were far more educated and diverse than media caricatures portrayed them, and the Left’s attempt to marginalize those voters would “come back to haunt them.”

“Let’s face it: the conventional wisdom going into Tuesday, compared to the results we see now, shows a massive failure by the political class. Massive. Unprecedented, really,” Bolton argued. “And, as you point out, underestimating the American people. This is, to me, perhaps the most important parallel to Brexit, because in Britain, everybody who was anybody – anybody who knew anything – knew that Britain had to remain in the European Union, just as in this country, anybody with a brain knew that Hillary was destined to be the first female president. And they were all flatly wrong.”

“I’ve got to say, the disdain some of the NeverTrump people demonstrated not simply for Trump, but for Trump supporters, sent me over the overhead,” Bolton added. “You know, I’m a very lucky guy. I’m the first person in my family to go to college. My father was a firefighter for the city of Baltimore. He never graduated high school. My mother was a housewife. She never graduated high school. There’s not the slightest doubt in my mind, if they were alive today, they would have voted for Trump. And to hear some of the NeverTrumpers – not all of them, but some of them – pour disdain over that white working class portion of the population, which is what my parents were, just filled me with outrage. So I think it’s a great victory for the common man in America, and that drives the political class wild, too.”

Bolton agreed with Marlow that Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” gaffe was a watershed moment because successful candidates don’t attack the voters themselves, no matter how hard they go after the opposing candidate.

“Hillary and her husband were a year ahead of me in law school, so I’ve known them for a long time, and I have to tell you, in the early seventies at Yale Law School … there might have been one or two conservatives on the faculty – Robert Bork, Ralph Winter, Ward Bowman, great professors. There might have been about the same number of conservatives in the student body. Overwhelmingly Democratic, overwhelmingly leftist, overwhelmingly convinced they knew better than anybody else,” Bolton recalled.

“And I’d put right at the top of the list of the people who thought they knew better than anybody else, Hillary Clinton. She was destined, destined, to run the country. Her husband was not way, by the way. He was much more personable, a normal, easygoing kind of guy,” Bolton continued. “So when you are Hillary Clinton and you are a master of the universe, smarter than everybody else, you know what’s good for them. And if they’d just do what you tell them to do, they’d feel so much better, she’d feel better, the world would be happy.”

“The people said, and again, I feel this was a parallel with Brexit, ‘Thank you very much; we’ll run our own lives. Don’t tell us what to do. Don’t tell us what to think. Don’t tell us what to say,’” he concluded.